the best nonfiction of 2023
New Zealand nonfiction in 2023 went in pursuit of worthy subjects – Māori health, white privilege, law and order, the foaming mad of the alt-right – but lacked the personal touch. In contrast with the blazing artistry and honesty of Charlotte Grimshaw’s memoir The Mirror Book (2021) and Noelle McCarthy’s memoir Grand (2022), the two best memoirs of 2023, There’s a Cure for This by Emma Espiner and From There to Here by Joe Bennett, were somewhat restrained, kind of withholding. I had a feeling Espiner’s book was going to be subdued when I learned she had abandoned the working title Practical Skills for the Zombie Apocalypse.
There were a lot of awful political memoirs, from such as Steven Joyce and Chris Finlayson, intent on banging the drum of their apparently faultless careers in office; Kiri Allen is set to get in on the act in 2024. The best political book of the year by a long stretch was We Need to Talk About Norman, Denis Welch’s essay on Norman Kirk. There were a lot of humdrum rugby books timed to appear during the humdrum World Cup. The best sports book of the year by a country mile was Not Set in Stone by mountaineer Dave Vass, and not merely because he wrote the year’s most harrowing passage.
I think the best books of the year were all surveys of New Zealand life lived at its extremes. There was Fear, Byron Clark’s sometime overheated, broad-brushed, and scaredy-cat analysis of the alt-right mad, and Jared Savage’s Gangster’s Paradise, a masterclass of investigative journalese about organised crime. But the best of the lot was Commune, by Olive Jones, a report on the extreme years of the New Zealand rural counterculture, when hippies and anarchos and dreamers bent their backs and worked day and night to create a Country Calendar paradise of organic farming, shared resources, and respect for the Earth. It’s such a good read. Get thee to a bookstore at once.
Commune: Chasing a Utopian Dream in Aotearoa by Olive Jones (Potton & Burton, $40)
The best nonfiction book of 2023. I commissioned a review by Miro Bilbrough, who knew the author in the 1980s, at communes in Nelson. From her review: “Out with the horses, in for smoko with the men after plowing the fields, ever in motion, Olive was magnetically androgynous, seriously can-do, an Amazonian other. She was very visibly a pioneer of the rural counterculture… In her enthralling part auto-anthropology, part memoir, part green-agricultural procedural, Olive herself is a compelling correspondent: clear-eyed, plain-speaking, with a stealth humour directed at the many absurdities of groups of people living in an anarchist-informed environment.”
Gangster’s Paradise: New Zealand’s deadly escalation of organised crime by Jared Savage (HarperCollins, $39.99)
Very nearly the best nonfiction book of the year. Savage, an ace hack with the Herald, presented a series of exciting, violent yarns about organised crime – the gangs, the drugs, the cops who chase the gangs and the drugs – in brisk tabloid style that was occasionally laced with the fancy prose of his consulting editor, which just happened to be me. From a review by Meg de Ronde: “From the opening pages on the 501 deportees to Aotearoa, to the lack of appropriate gun control laws, this book has a deeper story to tell than gang warfare. The book is actually at its best when Savage takes a deep breath and dives into the back story. The chapter on Kawerau, with its brief reflection on the economic and political drivers that led the town down a path of deprivation, is one of the most arresting in Gangster’s Paradise…The wild tales have the potential to make a wide audience think harder about our current approach to gangs, guns, drugs and policing.”
Fear: New Zealand’s hostile underworld of extremists by Byron Clark (HarperCollins, $37)
A brainy and serious report on the foaming mad. From a review by Chris Wilson: “The first book to provide an overview of the multitude of groups and individuals loosely categorised as alt-right. Clark is an independent researcher who has done invaluable work in exposing the ideologies, behaviour and online and offline presence of a range of fringe political groups and individuals. He has an unparalleled knowledge of this network, their YouTube and Telegram channels, and the connections between them. The book (like Clark’s Twitter account) is a crucial starting point for anyone seeking to understand the alt-right in New Zealand. It is beautifully written and contains excellent insights that can inform the study of contemporary extremism.”
There’s a Cure for This by Emma Espiner (Penguin Random House, $35)
I think this will win the nonfiction prize at next year’s Ockhams, even though it was pretty thin at something like 50,000 words, and I wished she had opened up more about her life – a wish that the author granted when I asked her to write a self-portrait for ReadingRoom, and she wrote, “The process of selling a house is hellish at any time, but when you layer a broken relationship and severed family onto it, participating in every administrative decision is like being at the base of an open wound, with a Stanley knife pushing into your wrecked tissue.” The best review of There’s a Cure for This came from Amy McDaid in the Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books: “While it’s subtitled ‘a memoir’, it reads as an collection of 17 essays, with titles like ‘Don’t Plant a Fruit Tree Over Your Uterus’ and ‘I Am Going to Demonstrate Empathy Now’. They form a deftly woven meditation on how we as a nation must strive for health equity. Espiner’s tales of debauched student life at Otago, her anxieties as a mother, and the trials of student doctor life are springboards into deeper conversations around intergenerational trauma, its ramifications for Māori, the importance of empathy, and how ingrained biases and the systems we’ve set up do not always serve our most vulnerable.”
Ithaca by Alie Benge (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35)
I think this collection of personal essays will make the nonfiction shortlist at next year’s Ockhams; writing as powerful as this, from an excerpt in ReadingRoom, warrants high reward: “I’d planned a weekend trip to Melbourne with three male friends and as soon as we took our seats on the train I knew I’d made a terrible mistake. Later that night, I would pass out in our hotel room after drinking with all three of them. I’d wake up, the room spinning, with only one of them. After a horrible breakfast with this man, who was not only the first to assault me but also the first to kiss me, the first to do anything with me, we had an hour-long train ride, a short taxi ride to the naval base we were posted to, and a long walk back to the barracks. I’d barely spoken all morning and as soon as we reached the gates I sped up without saying goodbye and they let me get ahead of them. I finally got back to my room, and while blubbing and hiccupping, carefully placed my hand everywhere he’d touched me. I ran fingers through my hair, wrapped them around my arm, slid a hand up my own skirt. I understood something I didn’t have a language for: that this was an important thing to do, though I couldn’t explain why.”
From There to Here by Joe Bennett (HarperCollins, $40)
Is there a better prose stylist than the letter writer from Lyttelton? I love his light touch, his columns on such as discovering an insect on his jacket while sitting down to a fancy lunch; the first volume of his memoirs got personal, to a degree. From my review: “It’s typical and vintage Bennett, an easy and familiar ride. But there is a new register. He has always had a marvellous sensitivity, a genuine feeling for the vulnerable; finally, at last, he turns it on himself. He opens up. He writes about his love life. He writes about his sexuality. More so, he writes about beauty – male beauty, first felt at 14…His book could easily and rightly be co-opted into some kind of anthology of LGBTQIA+ writing. But Bennett himself doesn’t seem especially interested in his queerness. There is a particular kind of tenderness to From There to Here, a yearning, very delicately expressed. It’s a sweet and intensely memorable book of platonic love.”
Not Set in Stone: The passion and consequence of a mountain life by Dave Vass (Potton & Burton, $39.99)
Winner of the 2023 Nankervis/Bamford NZ Mountain Book of the Year award. From an excerpt in ReadingRoom: “The moment my life changes forever isn’t much in the scheme of things – a minor event amid the wildness around us. Nothing else changes when I fall. The storm rages on. Boulders lose their grip on the bed of rivers, trees snap and grind as they fall, banks collapse. The mountains shed their skin yet again. For me, a root breaks, a hand fails to grab a saving branch. They are small things in comparison, and the moment only takes a second or two. The fall, though, headfirst through the darkness, seems to take forever. There is time to think that this time it won’t be alright, and so it turns out. There is an impact; a sickening crunch travels through my head. I lie face down in the wet ground, in the darkness. I can’t move, I can’t call for help. There’s water around my face and I already know; there is an instant knowing.”
Te Kooti’s Last Foray by Ron Crosby (Oratia Books, $49.99)
History. From a review by Buddy Mikaere: “It covers a crucial episode in the New Zealand Wars, detailing the capture of 218 Whakatōhea people near Ōpōtiki by Māori prophet and rebel Te Kooti in 1870. It’s a military history told in great detail – not surprising, given Crosby has a deserved reputation for accurate scholarship in the field …The fine detail makes it an invaluable record and brings to a tidy and satisfactory conclusion one of the more interesting events in our shared 19th century history.”
Privilege in Perpetuity: Exploding a Pākehā Myth by Peter Meihana (Bridget Williams Books, $17.99)
History, of a kind. From a review by Vincent O’Malley: “Meihana’s book, based on his 2015 PhD thesis, explores and critiques the notion that Māori are a uniquely privileged people, tracing its origins to James Cook’s 18th Century voyages…Historical literacy and awareness is the enemy of ill-informed bigotry. That is why the teaching of New Zealand history in all schools from this year is so important. And it’s also why Peter Meihana’s book charting the origins and subsequent development of the notion of Māori privilege is so timely.”
We Need to Talk About Norman: New Zealand’s Lost Leader by Denis Welch (Quentin Wilson Publishing, $40)
The best political book of the year by a long stretch. From a review by Tom Scott: “In essence a long, loving obituary and tender homage to Norm Kirk…The rich detail, much of which was new to me even though I covered this period for the Listener, as well as the insights, clarity and accurate capture of the mood and tone of those tragic turbulent years, are a tribute to Denis’s diligence and painstaking research.”
ReadingRoom is devoting all week to naming the best books of the year. Tomorrow: illustrated nonfiction. Wednesday: Erena Shingade selects the top 10 best poetry books. Thursday: fiction.
